On ‘appearance’ and personhood in ‘Begotten or Made?’

Preface

This is the first of probably numerous posts to come with reflections on Oliver O’Donovan’s Begotten or Made?, a book I have been reading and rereading for the last three years and will undoubtedly continue to read.

I recently taught a class on the second-to-last chapter in the book, entitled ‘And who is a person?’, in which O’Donovan explores the question of when ‘personhood’ begins as way of interrogating the ethics of experimentation on human embryos (the subject matter of the book is in vitro fertilisation, and with typical perspicuity O’Donovan recognises that the topic embraces much more than a tool for infertile couples to get pregnant).

The chapter was challenging reading for my students, in part because O’Donovan seems to gesture towards his conclusion rather than explicitly stating and arguing for it. It can be hard to pin down just what his view is. Indeed, the mood of the whole book might be thought of as a ‘gesturing’ in words. It is an exploration into what IVF is, which turns out to be a very difficult thing to pin down. But each time I come back to the book I find that O’Donovan is saying more and with greater penetration and clarity than I had previously thought.

The bread trail I followed on this most recent re-reading was the concept of ‘appearance’. This proved a fruitful investigation because I discovered an aspect of his argument that had previously troubled me to in fact be remarkably illuminating.

I lay out my observations below.

A history of the concept

When we speak of a ‘person’, we speak of a persona — and it is well known that that term had special associations with the ancient theatre, where the persona was the character-mask. We speak, therefore, of an appearance. It is the appearance of an individual human being; the Greek equivalent means, simply, ‘face’. (p. 50, Oxford UP)

As O’Donovan goes on to describe, the manifesting appearance is not merely physical, but of continuity of character, of one who has a ‘history’.

By ‘history’ and (later) ‘inheritance’, he means not only having a past in which an observer might be interested, and concerning which the observer might inquire, but being given a past that tends toward a future (we might think here of vocation), and having something to pass on (cf. p. 54). The interest which such a being invokes in others towards itself is a critical sign that a person is there:

When Abraham entertained three heavenly visitors by his tent at Mamre, he slaughtered a calf. Has anyone ever asked which calf? Yet you could not slaughter a human being without slaughtering some particular human being, someone with a name, of whom it would make sense to ask ‘Who was it that died?’. (p. 51)

What he is described here is the phenomenology of personhood; specifically, of another’s personhood, not of one’s own.

To speak of a ‘person’, then, is to speak of ‘identity’, that which constitutes sameness between one appearance and another, and so makes us beings with histories and names. (p. 51)

Now the discussion has shifted from the phenomenological to the metaphysical: to that which underlies continuity of appearance — that is what ‘personhood’ is. On this basis O’Donovan is able to connect the Latin and Greek traditions of describing the event of the incarnation as two paths to the same conclusion. ‘Hypostasis’ is the underlying substance that is personhood — the ‘subject’ in which qualities such as rationality inhere.

O’Donovan argues that this conception of personhood as a ‘someone who’ with a history is superior to definitions prior and since which connect personhood to the having of this or that quality, such as rationality.

How a person appears

With the concept of personhood so closely joined to its history, O’Donovan argues that questions about its beginning and end are foregrounded for the first time. We might even say that our human nature now appears to us in such a way that these questions about it become critical (but perhaps I am pushing my theme too obnoxiously).

The question of when the person begins its history takes O’Donovan to the findings of genetic science and the tentative suggestion that ‘the fusion of sperm and ovum in a new genome…seems to provide an indication of the beginning of a new personal history at conception’ (56).

The suggestion is tentative because it describes an appearance, not a metaphysical juncture:

‘Person’ is a not a genetic or a biological category; to observe a gene is not to observe a person. What genetics can do is to show us an appearance of a human being which has decisive continuities with late appearances. It remains for another mode of knowledge to discern the hypostasis behind the appearances. (56–57)

The gene appears continuous with the later appearance of the person, but it does not appear as person. O’Donovan here hints at the point he goes on to develop: genetic observations are not sufficient to discern persons, even if there is in fact a person there to whom the gene belongs.

The appearance of personhood is thus proving fragile. It is possible to observe a thing in such a way that the manifestation of its personhood to us is precluded by the very mode of observation.

So what is the proper mode of knowledge for discerning persons? On O’Donovan’s account, it is actually quite epistemically demanding:

We discern persons only by love, by discovering through interaction and commitment that this human being is irreplaceable. Perhaps we only discover this, in the fullest sense, of a few human beings in the course of our lives, though we would have inklings of it with many more. If we assert that it is true of all human beings, we do so by a kind of faith (not unrelated to Christian faith) that the significance we have discerned in those we have loved is a significance which God attributes to all members of Adam’s race. It is possible to refuse this act of faith; it is never provable in a demonstrative sense. (59)

Because of how epistemically demanding this discernment is, O’Donovan suggests that most persons appear to us not by knowledge but by faith — a faith which is grounded in the corollary belief that although I cannot know all human beings as persons, God can.

Answering an old worry

One worry I previously had about this mode of discernment is that the basis on which any non-Christian would extend personhood to all human beings is unclear. And it’s also not clear to me that this presumption of personhood is properly considered an article of faith, attainable only by special revelation. When Aristotle sought to distinguish the human being from all other creatures by pointing to the ‘rational’ in ‘rational animal’, I think he was recognising something evident to most humans about human personhood, even if his choice to rest it on a qualitative distinction was ultimately unsatisfactory.

This is not to assume that all humans at all times have appeared to other humans as persons. History attests otherwise. But it at least seems possible at all times for any human to ask of any other the question ‘Who?’; to suppose that a story might be told about that individual in response to the sense of wonder that an encounter with a person evokes.

However, I no longer think O’Donovan is simply exhorting us to an act of faith which only Christians have grounds to take. I think he is assuming that under the ordinary conditions of nature such a faith in the personhood of the unborn can be (largely — not entirely) taken for granted. His point is that we have made this act of faith horribly difficult for ourselves by fundamentally altering the conditions of how the unborn appear to us.

When the argument moves towards O’Donovan’s powerful conclusion about the crime of embryo experimentation, the occasion for the crime is not (at least not directly) a wide forgetting of the Christian doctrine of the creation of man in God’s image, but a technological event which has produced human beings in abstraction from the story of their birth:

It is also appropriate to the enterprise of self-mastery itself that the ‘human subject’ of these researches should be called into existence by us apart from any human love, precisely for this end of being mastered and explored, and so should stand from the beginning beyond the reach of our compassion, simply at our disposal. …If we should wish to charge our own generation with crimes against humanity because of the practice of this experimental research, I would suggest that the crime should not be the old-fashioned crime of killing babies, but the new and subtle crime of making babies to be ambiguously human, of presenting to us members of our own species who are doubtfully proper objects of compassion and love. (65)

The problem of embryo experimentation began with embryo creation (and as such it is entirely fitting that O’Donovan should discuss it in the context of lectures on IVF, and not treat it as a distinct or periphery issue). In ordinary circumstances of human conception and birth, the presumption of the personhood of the new human life is quite natural because the baby manifests to the parents, and soon after to those who know them, as a continuation on their own story. From their first awareness of the child’s conception, it is apparent to the parents that this child already has a history. And for almost all, a perfectly obvious next thought will be to wonder at who the child will be, to wonder at how that history will unfold as a new story yet to be told.

When we make an embryo in the laboratory, we abstract it from the first answer any person can give to the question of ‘Who?’: ‘son of Fred and Mary,’ ‘daughter of Eliza and Rob.’ Indeed, we abstract it from the wider story that encompasses all mankind in God’s purposes: son of Adam, daughter of Eve. Under the lens of the microscope, under the influence of the pipette, one sees a collection of cells which is no one’s son or daughter.

It is not only because it is destined to be tested on and discarded, but first and foremost because our only mode of encounter with it is outside of the natural human family, that we preclude the possibility of the embryo’s personhood ever appearing.